China's THREAT to the US: A MASTERCLASS with Glenn Tiffert

I come from the humanities and social sciences there's a lot of great work being done there so our immensely productive research infrastructure and universities and industry that drive the US economy that help us solve the problems that really matter that new technology new solutions to human problems this is what's been so vital and dynamic for the United States for decades however for decades we had an open policy because of our it was luxury we enjoyed of having a predominant position

of being the world leader we felt like we could share everything with everyone and in particular by modeling that good behavior here we could encourage others to behave in similar ways and most of our traditional partners were other Liberal democracies and so that seemed like a no brainer countries like Germany Japan UK Canada France and others but then suddenly out of nowhere emerged countries non traditional research partners ahead really different local systems really different visions

of the kind of world that they wanted to live in many of them were one party states highly authoritarian and China was leading example of and for many countries China is the leading if not one of the leading if not the leading research partners it is for the United States far and away yet amount of international collaboration done with partners in China equals roughly the next two countries put together the UK and Germany and if you count those four countries the US China UK Germany

you have the world's research super powers Glen how's it going man great thanks for inviting me to be on the show I'm super excited to have you on today there's so much talk about in regard to China I was just hoping maybe you can start with a quick introduction so that people know who you are gladly so I'm Glen Tifer to distinguish research fellow at the Hoover Institution which is a public policy think tank based at Stanford University my training is as a historian of China

but I also co chair our program on the US China and the world along with my colleague Elizabeth Economy who's recently back from serving in the administration and together we have a comprehensive program on China that looks at China domestically that looks particularly at US competitiveness around the world with regards to China and technology and key sectors of our economy and then also the third pillar is a competition globally for narratives influence

and systemic structures of the international system awesome in researching kind of getting prepared for this podcast I just started digging in to China and the more you dig in more I think that we aren't thinking about China the right way let me just list out some of the issues that we have with China it's so pervasive that I think it leaves a lot of people befuddled IP theft human rights abuses economic influence university cheating research theft large scale espionage

ocean pollution CO2 emissions an alliance with Russia and one that I think is actually really interesting and and kind of caught my eye was illicit fishing there's so many different issues happening with China my my first question for you is are we even thinking about China the right way and what's wrong with the way the US population generally thinks about China I think uh large segments of our policy makers are alert to the comprehensiveness of

the challenge that China poses to the United States but we haven't been seized by appropriate urgency we're having real challenges mobilizing and coordinating ourselves so that we can begin to execute on the things that we need to do to effectively compete across the board with China the American public is being exposed to China largely through the lens of economic competitiveness that it's the flow of goods particularly supply chains and then also about military competition

especially with regards to Taiwan but as you suggested China is active in the world in a range of ways that tend not to show up in the headlines and so for the United States and what I spend a lot of my time doing is trying to help us begin to solve our coordination problems and understand that this is a broad full spectrum challenge of the sort that we've never really faced before even including the the period of the Cold War where we were in rivalry with the Soviet Union he'll recall

that the Soviet Union was a military superpower but economically it was really quite weak China is militarily technologically and economically a near peer competitor with United States we've never been in this territory before yeah you mentioned near peer competitor that's that's something I hear a lot in the in the military space if we're talking about the way people are thinking about China how should our military and intelligence leaders think about China obviously there's the raw data right

just understanding the movements of their military and navy and all that good stuff but how does China think about warfare do they even think that a hot war with the United States is a possibility yeah that's the big question I would say the following the flashpoint that is probably most acute militarily is in the South China Sea involving Taiwan's status and China's claims over Taiwan as your audience is probably aware China regards Taiwan as a breakaway province

that will eventually reunite with the motherland the United States takes a different view United States would like to preserve the freedom of Taiwan's people to choose their own destiny and hopefully at some indeterminate point in the future for there to be a peaceful resolution of the status of Taiwan now China and particularly under siegeon Ping has been very methodically laying down the groundwork brick by brick to create a military option that could exercise at some point in the future

they're not quite there yet but they very likely will be in the next five to eight years in which case if she didn't Ping woke up one morning and said you know what I'm gonna go for it you'll have all of the ingredients in place to do that and so it's really incumbent on the United States to shore up the deterrence that we've preserved in that region really since the end of World War 2 regarding Taiwan and we have that opportunity now if we step up really quickly

the ball in some senses in our court you know it's worth reflecting on the war in Ukraine after the Russians seized Crimea and there was a period of time in which Europe and the United States could have mobilized to do much more to maintain deterrence in that region but clearly deterrence failed and Putin sense that he had an opportunity to make a move on all of Ukraine and he did we face a similar opportunity right now to shore up deterrence in the region so that she didn't think says

you know what there's sufficient uncertainty that even with all the hard work and money that I have spent building the military option I could prevail at acceptable cost in an acceptable time frame and that's where we want to be so we got to invest hard because we are losing our edge right now in that region when you mention Taiwan how did the people of Taiwan feel about China ah that's a great question Taiwan's an incredibly vibrant pluralistic democracy it is in a sense

one of the world's best success stories for a transition from a one party authoritarian state into a socially progressive economically Liberal vibrant pluralistic electoral democracy you couldn't do it any better than the way they did it peacefully and that in and of itself is deeply threatening to the PRC because it demonstrates that there's nothing incompatible between Chinese culture and electoral Liberal democracy Taiwan has pulled it off and done it quite well and if you look

they're executing brilliantly on high technology it's not even like they had to give up anything economically to to achieve that this is intolerable to a one party authoritarian state like the CCPS regime in China and the people of Taiwan generationally because there's all this great public polling because it's a free society there's a generational split in Taiwan in which older people will feel more of an ethnic Chinese identity and an affiliation with a greater Chinese population

and a connection to the mainland and China and the PRC a large segment of Taiwan's population fled the mainland in 1949 when the nationals government collapsed and they tended to be those who dominated political and cultural spaces for several decades thereafter in Taiwan their descendants up until quite recently still felt a connection to the mainland but in the last 15 years or so that's begun to shift just as a function of generational change and people under 40 increasingly

have a uniquely Taiwanese identity where they'll say yes we are sort of ethnically Chinese and culturally Chinese but we're not politically connected to the mainland and we wanna govern our our own affairs and we have this Taiwanese identity increasingly they use that word they identify as Taiwanese not Chinese and that's critical because that means that the PRC despite decades of trying to win hearts and minds is actually lost ground which means that really

the only viable option it has for reunifying or absorbing Taiwan is coercive because as time passes the Taiwanese people feel no affinity towards the mainland you bring up an interesting perspective because if you look at just geographically right Taiwan's very close to China that you don't have far to go obviously there's some issues with deep water vessels close to Taiwan there's not much you can do they're just based on the geography you bring up an interesting question

which is the human geography so I guess will they invade Taiwan who knows but my actual real question is can they invade Taiwan and what do they have to gain let's say they invade Taiwan and then the people are like yeah we're not building these semi conductors for you sorry like we don't belong here or they flee they go to the Philippines or they you know they get out of dodge what is there to gain from just can coercion alone be enough to control population

to make them do what you want them to do yeah that is a great question and for those who are thinking about military planning contingency scenarios and deterrence the question of will to fight is especially strong you know again we have the example of Ukraine where I think many people thought that Ukraine would fall very quickly and that the Ukrainian military and people would not resist and they would be foolish to resist a Russian juggernaut and yet they were proven so very wrong by that

and so these are the kinds of things that are really difficult to answer you don't know until I I suppose a military and a people are tested and to a large extent Taiwan could not hold out by itself it would be utterly reliant on the United States and and the United States allies and partners in that region to survive if the PRC decided to invade and if it was clear that aid was not forthcoming then the Taiwanese people might in fact choose not to resist

and that's not a position we want put anyone in we wanna preserve their freedom of options I suppose and allow them to control their own destiny but you know it's a David and Goliath story you've got 1.4 billion people on one side and 24 odd million people on the other world's largest military on one side in a very small relatively underfunded military that's falling behind technologically on the other and so yes the PRC if it wanted to could take Taiwan in several years

once it develops the amphibious landing capability there potentially would be a high cost and so it's really a question of would she and Ping be willing to bear that cost I will say rhetorically he has made it very clear that it is his intention to absorb Taiwan and in some sense the PRC has been talking about this really for more than 70 years that Taiwan is the last piece of unfinished business from the Chinese civil war but it's become more insistent more real more urgent under sheeted thing

so I wanna just touch on this a little bit more there's so many great topics to get to but when I talk to military commanders in the indopaycom region their big focus is partnerships and and these global partnerships who are our key partners in that region and who kind of brings the most to the fight in regard to boarding China's advances so you have to remember that the United States in that region does not have a NATO like architecture in which it's sort of you know all for one one for all

but rather we have a series of bilateral relationships with nations in the region that are largely about preserving mutual defense bilaterally so we have a US mutual defense treaty for example with Japan we have one with Korea we have one with the Philippines and so those are our bilateral allies and they are not treaty bound to come to the defense of any particular other member their relationships are all sort of straight lines to the United States and not necessarily lateral

so it it's a choice that they would have to make about whether they wanted to get involved in the fight um now having said that the United States would be highly reliant on our infrastructure facilities in the Western Pacific in particular Japan um and possibly also the Philippines so we don't quite have what we used to have in the Philippines in order to mount any assistance to Taiwan defense or intervention in a conflict and so there is a question about

the extent to which Japan would be willing to allow US to use our facilities to participate in a conflict at the risk of Japan being drawn dragged into a war or on the other side the extent to which Japan would actively participate as a combat and that's a choice a Japanese government would have to make but the United States plus Japan as active combatants would be formidable because they have really complimentary interoperable security architectures and orders of battle

and we've been exercising for a long time together a lot of people don't realize that actually the nearest Japanese island is I think about 80 miles away from Taiwan so they have a front row seat if there's any conflict over Taiwan and in fact Japanese public opinion really shifted in the last few years where in a series of military exercises after speaker the House Pelosi went to Taiwan and the PRC expressed its extreme displeasure by having military exercises around Taiwan

and firing missiles into the ocean some of those missiles overflow Japanese territory and landed in Japanese waters and the Japanese that was a tipping an inflection point in which the Japanese public said we don't like that and it really changed opinion on on the extent to which China represents a threat to Japanese peace and security but so those are the key partners it's Japan and the Philippines in particular but then it's also Australia and Korea and we have to think that

if there's a conflict between China and Taiwan there's always a possibility that North Korea takes advantage of the fact that the US is distracted and we're already involved in Ukraine and then does something on the Korea border as well so it's very easy for it to get big fast okay that's interesting I know one of the biggest struggles in that region with partnerships is information sharing intelligence sharing it's been a long standing issue with the United States

and working with allies and partners about you know how do we declassify certain things and classify certain things and share that with our friends and partners in the region but speaking about information sharing and gathering let's talk a little bit about TikTok because TikTok I'm sure you probably don't have a TikTok Glen but TikTok has 170 million users in the United States that's far superior to any other social media platform uh and if you look at the usage times as well

way through the roof young people are in it are using TikTok in droves and of course the reason why there's currently seeking a ban is because there's a belief that China is using TikTok TikTok TikTok tik toks to these tik toks for the breast and TikTok to spy on US citizen or at least gather data is there any evidence at all supporting that and then do you think it's strong enough that TikTok should be banned in the United States and then even furthermore what are the broader implications

why would China wanna do business with us if every time they have a new app or a new device or something like that DJI is a massive drone manufacturer that destroying all American drone manufacturers and anytime that they have a new product a new device a new technology they can't access our market because we just say no no no they're using it for intelligence gathering what are the implications there that is a great question so let me start on the back end of that

and then we'll get to the TikTok and whether it represents risk for the United States I think TikTok byd EGI the drone makers these firms are all laying to rest the really misguided presumption that China only succeeds by stealing and cannot innovate in fact what distinguishes China as opposed to our previous nations we regarded as near pure competitors is that it is a fierce competitor if anything it is proving itself to be more nimble than our market driven economies

and we are struggling to keep pace with the level of innovation coming out of there in particular areas and we will soon see that in the biotext space to China's invested enormous amounts of money into ensuring that it scales the biotech pinnacles of technological dominance too so think about pharmaceuticals which is an area that the US has has dominated for decades that may we may be in a race now in in biotech and pharmaceuticals and genomics as well

so let's put to rest that China cannot innovate because China now has firms that are globally competitive with the best that anybody else has to offer and TikTok is a great example of that TikTok is a great example of how they can have a domestically closed highly censored in police information sphere and yet create products that globally can take on the best that anybody else has to offer and so you raise the question and I think it's an important one

particularly at this moment in in US politics how do we deal with that do we retreat into Fortress America build the walls high and hide behind them because all of these maybe there's unfair competition maybe there's CCP control of these platforms so that they all those risk and abandon the rest of the world to these platforms or products securing the knowledge that Fortress North America is safe or and I think that's a dead end it's a land of diminishing returns in the irony of courses

it turns America into this little Antarctic island that resembles what Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union Union used to be while China is active globally around the world in seizing markets we don't wanna be in that position our carmakers our computer companies our high tech companies and pharmaceuticals and you just name the industry if we retreat to Fortress America they will shrivel they will wither they will be under less competitive pressure to innovate

and we will find that they fall further and further behind so I think it is the wrong approach for us to do that instead we should tackle them head on and do the best we can to compete and figure out what role government and industry can play together to overcome the unfair competition that China in fact engages in but you know what China is not gonna change we can complain about it till the cows come home so the question is what are we gonna do about it um and retreating behind tariff walls is

is really not the right approach now with regard to TikTok um it is my own belief that TikTok poses an extreme example of a much broader challenge in social media it's not as if misinformation disinformation and manipulation of the electorate is unique to TikTok we're seeing this across the spectrum of social media platforms and in fact many of the campaigns that exist on TikTok have analogues or in fact are happening in parallel on the other platforms because um

the goal really is to reach the widest audience to have that impact and so it would be better if the United States had a more comprehensive policy regarding data privacy ownership of platforms and transparency rather than doing a whackamole approach which is what we basically done across from one sector to another saying TikTok's a problem we'll just go after TikTok BGI's a problem we'll just go after BGI b y d's a problem we'll just go after B y d we need a more comprehensive approach

because today TikTok tomorrow's something else and the danger is unfortunately this was recently addressed in legislation we could have banned TikTok but the markets for private data that exist in the United States that were until quite recently relatively lightly regulated made it such that fine ban TikTok but malign players from abroad could enter the US market and still buy all of the data and use it for malign purposes because we don't have overarching data regulation

so we gotta solve that problem comprehensively to rather than going after sort of these individual actors swatting it flies so it sounds to me like what you're saying is yes they're spying on us but no it doesn't matter because they can purchase the data elsewhere or get it through other means I actually agree with you because if you look at your phone I mean I don't know how many apps I've downloaded over the years for stupid things I see apps on there like I don't know where this came from

like what is this app doing and I think that's probably most people right is download an app or you put something on your phone you don't really think about it I feel like I think it does matter that that TikTok is by all evidence at least indirectly owned and controlled by an entity that is adversarial to the United States and that it is so influential it does put it in a sort of class by itself but I think we still need a broader based approach to it and TikTok yeah it clearly I mean

you just have to look at Romania's recent election where a candidate came out of nowhere in fact he wasn't even a real serious candidate it was a person who literally popped out of nowhere and then suddenly ran away with the election because of a TikTok campaign that's chilling it also it it is about more than TikTok it is about also I think that particular candidate met a need in the Romanian electorate that was unmet by the traditional political parties

let us also focus on the kind of social alienation the problems that I think emerged in in our electoral campaign about how people feel like their needs are not being met by traditional politics if we can do that if we can be a more responsive democracy then the ability of malign actors outside to influence us into manipulate the electorate will be diminished you mention Romania and they're actually Romania has to completely redo their entire election because they looked at 80000+ cyber attacks

and you talk about this influential TikTok campaign they basically elected a very pro Russian Canada so they're gonna have to redo the whole thing I wanna Wanna flip over though and talk about what you're doing regarding research I mentioned one of the issues that we have with China is that they steal so much and we can talk a little bit about how they're doing that or why they're doing that you're involved in a program that's funded by the National Science Foundation called the Secure program

I wonder if you could maybe tell us about that a little bit yeah so one of the great strengths of the United States for decades has been its immensely open and productive research infrastructure particularly at universities where they do fundamental research and things like everything from cosmology to genetics to a financial technology computer science you just name all of the departments and of course I come from the humanities and social sciences there's a lot of great work being done there

so our immensely productive research infrastructure and universities and industry that drive the US economy that help us solve the problems that really matter that the new technologies new solutions to human problems this is what's been so vital and dynamic for the United States for decades however for decades we had an open policy because it was the luxury we enjoyed of having a predominant position of being the world leader we felt like we could share everything with everyone

and in particular by modeling that good behavior we could encourage others to behave in similar ways and most of our traditional partners were other Liberal democracies and so that seemed like a no brainer countries like Germany Japan the UK Canada France and others but then suddenly out of nowhere emerged countries non traditional research partners that had really different political systems really different visions of the kind of world that they wanted to live in

many of them were one party states highly authoritarian um and China was the leading example of those and for many countries China is the leading if not uh one of the leading if not the leading research partners it is for the United States far and away the amount of international collaboration done with partners in China equals roughly the next two countries put together the UK and Germany and if you count those four countries the US China UK and Germany you have the world's research superpowers

but China has a different set of goals it's seeing this as an opportunity to absorb the best international research and use it as instruments of national power for which China then has ambitions to military technology to push the US out of the Western Pacific and to enhance its position in the world in ways that might be anathetical to our interests and values and so the challenge really has been how do we exist in a world which is growing more complex in which um our traditional Liberal

democratic partners are being joined by non democratic authoritarian partners have different visions of the world how do we cooperate in that more complex environment to continue to drive innovation and research um and to what degree do we have to modify our earlier paradigm of radical openness the secure program tries to solve this problem by developing best practices and good data to help people make better decisions and help guide their thought processes

and sort of institutional decision trees about how do we collaborate internationally with a given partner how do we think about these really complex problems so that we can exercise the academic freedom the institutional autonomy that we have in ways that are wiser and perhaps take on the a broader set of interests national interests then um and has traditionally been the case and it it's really important that this is not being that this is not happening within government

but it's happening within the research community giving them the opportunity to help come up with solutions that make sense to them and that will be operable within their own institutions and this is a five year project and we're just getting started on it it's really exciting it's a big challenge but we hope to make progress very soon man it's really interesting in the intelligence community we operate and skips right secure compartment information facilities and for a long time I've always

seen these parallels between research institutions and the intelligence community and I think that the secure program is really interesting and like you said it's a newer thing but I can totally see a future where we have skits in all the major universities across the United States that way we can leverage and access the brain power from university research and from all the smart people at these universities if something were to ever happen I'll tell you one of our biggest issues

it's just getting the knowledge to the right decision makers because we are so limited on our TS networks and our secret networks as to where you can access them and how you can get the information out it's actually to me I think it's worth looking at probably a d and I type issue so that's very good I talked to a lot of students actually sorry I wanted to shift over for a second I talked to a lot of students because of my wife she has multiple international students and I asked about the other

students and all that good stuff and I had a few of them mention to me that the Chinese students cheat do the Chinese students cheat this was the context I was told that this is by multiple people have told me this that when the Chinese students come to United States they have basically a mentor or a partner a previous Chinese student who has all the materials for them will basically hand them all the work that they're about to do for that semester and they have

like a team approach to passing university getting better grades is this something have you heard of this or is this crazy I have heard of this look some students cheat right it's it's not like Chinese to I mean like some students cheat there will always be students search I think it is incredibly important and should be baked into every program that has international students to in the process of orienting them when they arrive on campus acculturate them to what the rules of good behavior are

in the United States in this academic program because often that is not done in cultural practices that would be acceptable or behaviors that would be overlooked in one country may not be acceptable or may not be overlooked here in the United States and we can assume that people will know that will want to disabuse them of habits that they may have picked up in in their countries that are incompatible with our standards of academic integrity and that's on us to do in the beginning

because you can't expect people to know what the rules of the road are if anyone's ever driven in a different country right there are the formal rules and the informal ones and so we've got to educate them up at the outset to ensure that that they understand what is considered good academic citizenship now having said that the Chinese system is such that it is brutally competitive and students and even academic faculty will often take shortcuts simply because if you see others doing it

you'll be a sucker if you don't try to leverage the same advantages because the system is is metric driven extremely achievement driven and so if you wanna have opportunity and very few opportunities to given the number of people in it and so it produces a that has perverse incentives which produces the kinds of behaviors that you describe and I think it's up to faculty to adjust their courses in ways that make it more difficult to do that we're facing that anyway

in the classrooms across the board now with generative AI in which students are maybe not putting the same individual effort into their essays as they might have a generation to go because the generative AI can do the heavy lifting for them so you've got to adjust to ensure that the integrity standards are maintained that's interesting you mention that because my daughter has to do this presentation to her class she's in 4th grade and I tried to tell her that the material

the Powerpoint poster whatever you're presenting that's not what's being presented what's being presented is you when you go out there and you're presenting a subject that's just the material that's the backup with all this push with generative AI and all that stuff I think it's really important for students and really anybody and industry wherever understand that when you're presenting something you're presenting you you're not presenting the topic it's you your knowledge

I think that the academics think this way as well so when they start having exams and research papers all that stuff they start relying more on oral presentations I think oral presentations are an absolute great way to go for students but yeah the hard work is where the learning actually happens right yeah I know that's exactly right you mentioned a couple things about the societal norms of China and how this pressure cooker of competition could kind of lead people to doing some

less than kosher things in our eyes what are some of the other maybe societal norms that in China that the United States is less familiar with there is a widespread sense that China is a highly collectivist society and in many cases I would say that that's a misunderstanding I've never seen the level of individualism exhibited in society that I've seen in China anywhere else and I think that's largely a function of the fact that people sink and swim in the most urgent

sort of life altering way on their own effort and the unlocking of that in China 40 years ago is what has produced China's economic miracle in some sense China is a more dickensian society than even sort of 19th century England in which the social safety net is really thin it can be an exploitative economic society and so people have to hustle in ways that are almost unimaginable for the ordinary comfortable American and this is true of course

in a lot of the world where there's a social safety net you could litter without one you could literally starve to death um without your own effort and so the level of individualism is extreme social trust is relatively low but having said that the Chinese people are immensely proud of their nation their history their culture in ways that I think we also should appreciate and so when people sometimes talk about encouraging the Chinese people to overthrow their government

to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party Chinese people have complicated feelings about the Chinese Communist Party especially in recent years because the economic performance has fallen off you should never underestimate the pride that they have in their own history and their culture and and we should never sort of insert ourselves as knowing better than them about what is good for them that's really interesting and probably a little bit mind blowing for some people

for me especially I've always thought of China as like this collectivist society and that's the way that they think but when you put it that way you talk about a sheer number of people and what they have to do to stand out and I could see that creating a more individualistic society what are some of the internal struggles in China that maybe we don't quite see I know that they have a declining birth rate I'm sure that they're doing things to address that what are some other internal struggles

within the country that maybe aren't as apparent to us large sections of China are running out of water economic growth has been extremely wasteful of water resources and the growth of immensely large cities and development in all without regard to the conservation of resources has really taxed on their hydrology and so large sections of North China where Beijing for example the capital is and many other large cities are among the driest capital cities and major cities in the world

and so the Chinese government is contemplating major water diversion projects from all the way clear on the other side of the country in order to feed the thirst of these cities as the water table really kinda disappears and ground starts to subside this is the kind of thing which is economically probably unviable but the Chinese government doesn't think in the dollars and cents terms it's about keeping those cities as going enterprises so water is one you mention the demographics

it's becoming acute now in ways that are just impossible to hide that the demographic pyramid of China is basically inverted so there's very few young people now supporting a much growing older population and 20 or 30 years ago that China's last baby boom was at the end of the 1960s and so it was that generation which at the height of their working age productivity drove China's economic miracle of the last 30 years but now they're in their fifties and they're beginning to age out

and become sort of net draws on the system rather than contributors to it and so economically also with regard to military manpower cohort of young men available for recruitment into the army is really gonna acutely drop off but in a population of 1.4 billion they can still field a very large army that's another area the limits of their growth model for decades they could simply invest more and it translated into economic growth but for about the last dozen years

their total factor productivity has been stagnant or declining which means that they're not getting greater returns for their investment and in fact each dollar of investment is now returning just a fraction of a dollar in actual economic growth but they haven't found a way to reinvent their growth model and so they're doubling down and they're burning more money for less return so this is a huge issue and that's what's really supported the legitimacy of the CCP

because Chinese people got used to the idea that every year would be better than the last it was this just straight up trajectory of wealth when you talk to somebody who's 50 years old and they can remember the idea of like getting a watch was a big idea let alone a black and white TV or a color TV and now people in their 50s especially in the cities are living just as well if not better than people anywhere else in the world and so within their lifetimes the transformation has been extreme

but China seems to hit a ceiling now and young people their very few jobs the unemployment rate is very high and young people are beginning to despair that what was available for their parents generation will not be available for them this is perhaps it's unclear right now but this is something that the party should be very worried about disaffected young people you mentioned some of their economic struggles yeah will tariffs be a good let me phrase this differently

are tariffs a good tool to use as leverage against China when dealing with China I should say as a good tool to create a better deal for our relationship with China whether that's some of the things I mentioned with research are tariffs a good tool to use as leverage get what we want out of China I'm glad you mentioned the research piece because up to this point a lot of the US response to the challenges that China poses are responses that involve the negative side of the equation

sort of denying China slowing down China blocking China and on the secure program side of it too there is an aspect of that like how do we be more thoughtful about our engagements with China to ensure that our relationships are reciprocal and mutually beneficial likewise in industry economic competition but a critical piece of this the piece that we have been less successful at standing up but I think will be the larger component of whether we actually come out in a more favorable position

is the positive side of the equation how do we ensure that the US is more economically competitive how do we ensure that US research continues to be the most productive in the world where do we make the investments how do we overcome the coordination and mobilization problems how do we in coordinate with our allies and partners to create better markets in which we can sell more goods simply raising tariffs and retreating to Fortress America is not gonna achieve that

that might be a temporary solution it might deal with certain symptoms but if we're worried about let's take electric vehicles flooding the US market fine we can protect the US market but what about the rest of the world in which if GM and Ford Wanna maintain anything like their current status if the workers in the US and Canada who work for GM and Ford wanna continue having the factories to work in and keep their jobs we gotta sell cars globally so we've got to be out in those markets

with products that compete on price on features on innovation so retreating building walls yes that can in limited ways be part of the solution it can buy us time but in the long run we've got to address the positive side of the equation and create a vision for competition that ensures that the world continues to look to the United States as it has for decades as a technological leader as an inspiration as a model of democratic society and as a guarantee of international peace and security

and I worry that as we retreat from and we're understandably tired we spent a lot of blood and treasure around the world but if we retreat that vacuum will in fact be filled by a country like China in concert with countries like Russia and Iran and others and is that the kind of world we wanna live in it's an important question which I think we're struggling with right now is a nation saw recently that China has banned the export of certain precious minerals to United States

is that a reaction to Trump's tariffs or is that a reaction to the chips actor what's your reaction to this so for a number of years China has observed that the US has this really intricate and sophisticated tool set for export controls and also for financial regulation so it's for example monitoring the Swift system and we really developed the most sophisticated pieces of that financial regulation tool kit with regard to terrorist financing after 9 11 so we could follow flows of money

but we also use it for sanctioning countries so China has looked on as the US has begun to kind of pull those levers more frequently around the world in the last decade or so often with regard to China the ZTE and Huawei sanctions for example a wake up call for China so they have been saying hmm we need to develop commencement tools that allow us to exercise our economic power in ways that advance our own economic interests and in fact maybe deter the unilateral US and European action

so China has begun to create those tools those rare earths and mineral export controls that were adopted were in fact in response to some of the technology curbs in particular the 2022 semiconductor export controls and that were adopted that were meant to kind of cut off China's access to the highest end semiconductor technologies China adopted in response to that some mineral export controls and now it's gone further in response to the intensification of

our attempts to limit their access to technology it's gone further down that road by trying to block transshipment of those critical minerals so there is a tit for tat going on here for sure right now the US has more leverage but China's realizes that in this rapidly trying to equalize the playing field yeah I mean if you don't have a lot of leverage in a negotiation you gotta create some somewhere right maybe that's makes sense that they would do that in response

I'm sure that with the new administration coming in there's gonna be all sorts of new levers that are pulled by the new administration that weren't pulled by the current one just real quick on that what are your thoughts on a Trump administration and their relationship to China versus a Biden administration their relationship to China like what changes there and what's what's good what's bad so I it's an interesting question because I think it's which Trump administration are we talking about

I work very closely with a number of of veterans of the first Trump administration and they played a critical role in pivoting American policy towards China I think being more realistic that the hope that China would play the role that we wanted it to play in the world was perhaps unrealized and that we needed to rethink our policy um towards China to a remarkable degree I think it surprised a lot of people especially the Chinese government the Biden administration

maintained a lot of those original Trump policies and and general orientation towards China so there was a lot of continuity and consistency from the first Trump administration through the Biden administration in ways that people did not expect the next Trump administration is a question Mark will it be a kind of continuation of certain paths that that were begun in the first administration or will he take things in a new direction I think it's really unclear what will happen

it's a new set of people in the important policy roles will have to see exactly what influence that they will have there's a possibility that they intensify travel further down the road right but there's also the possibility that they strike in a rather different direction I don't know well that's good nobody can predict the future right so yeah I see these people on the news oh this and this and this is gonna happen look people no one can predict the future just yeah chill out

you can try to speculate based on history and data and all that good stuff but really nobody can predict the future you can say that there are some gay people in the administration who have a record of of being China Hawks in a fairly conventional way yeah but then they work for boss the president who has a record of of being more transactional and being willing to cut deals and so it's a complex chemistry and it'll the boss ultimately is gonna be the one who makes the decision

that's the president's role in our system yeah and probably one of the most outsized roles of the executive branches foreign policy they have more say over foreign policy than really anything previously you mentioned how we leverage our dollar right sanctions and things like that and I think we go overboard with this all the time we overly sanction things and that causes countries to retreat maybe I was hoping you could talk a little bit about bricks

what is bricks should we be concerned about it this is a great question what is bricks bricks is a really loose club that different nations have signed up for for different reasons largely because they have a grievance or something that they're unhappy about with regard to the way that the international financial and economic system is currently organized which is favoured and of course it was set up in the wake of World War 2 by the victorious European North American powers

and so bricks are countries from the global south largely or the developing world plus Russia that feel like that system is not fully serving their interests and it's become a loose club in which they articulate visions of alternatives how could we reorder the international system in a way that's more responsive to our needs now having said that they all want different things out of it and so one should not think of it as this tight alliance it means different things to different partners

that was really clear in the most recent brick summit in cousin at which Putin announced the desire to pursue a bricks currency that would be parallel to the dollar and create a sort of separate parallel international payment system um independent of Swift to serve the interests of nations that took exception to the fact that the US has outsized control over the global financial system and he was kinda left all by himself by the other members who kinda took a step back and said hmm

not so sure about that right yeah and you can over that system right like you yeah and you can understand why Putin would feel that way cause he's been locked out of the international financial system right as a function of the war in Ukraine but the comprehensive financial sanctions adopted against Putin were did make other countries saying we wouldn't want to be on the receiving and no country should have that much power over the international system as the United States does

and so what the US needs to do is find maybe a balance or bring more countries along in so that when we exercise that power they don't feel like someday it could be directed at them and we begin to earn more trust by pulling on that lever of sanctions I think we've made countries begin to look for alternatives but there really aren't any right now dollar markets are too deep they're too liquid to open we have rule of law we have advanced capital financial institutions

so for the moment we are sitting in the catbird seat it's gonna take a lot for someone to amount a comprehensive challenge to dollar dominance and I don't see anyone in that position now they might nibble around the edges they might create particular pathways or currencies serve particular purposes it's very likely that some of these currencies would function kind of like a dark web of international finance in which things like international arms dealing um transactions in sanctioned commodities

like Iranian oil or Russian oil would happen off the books using these currencies but they wouldn't pose a comprehensive threat to the status of the dollar globally well you certainly make a good case for Bitcoin I mean that's what it sounds like to me is you know maybe they don't want some of that too yeah they don't wanna centralize control over their currency which makes sense to me a foreign country I don't want another country to have control over sanctioning individuals in my country

that seems insane to me and I and I get that so then bricks though you have Russia and China involved there what is the real threat of a Russia China alliance overall right so there's a diversity of opinions on this question Russia and China have a relatively long history of neighborly friction there's not a tremendous amount of love between the two countries but it's a marriage of convenience now each has its own grievances largely with the United States

but also with western institutions and systems and would like to see them changed in ways that benefit it and they find it I think convenient to cooperate in this regard and in particular if you're China for example the longer the Ukraine war goes on and you know Russia is basically on life support provided by China into a lesser extent India without that support the Russian economy and Russia's war machine likely would be experiencing really acute shortages right now

and the war might look quite different China is keeping Russia on life support without sort of actively getting involved in the war in order to tie up the United States and Europe and allow them to deplete their energies and resources military stockpiles in that war which relieves pressure in the Western Pacific for China and gives it a I think a freer rein to act globally so when you think about China Iran Russia North Korea they all find it wonderfully convenient to um

to help each other out in their own sort of special localities and so you don't quite have an access of evil but you have a coalition of the willing really on the other side that is making life very complicated for the United States in its traditional role as a kind of guarantee of international peace and security look we're active now in in Eastern Europe and Ukraine in the Red Sea we're supporting Israel and Gaza and now Syria has collapsed there's the question of Iran

there's North Korea and then there's Taiwan and that is really stretching the United States and ways that we've not been stretched at any one particular moment in time in a very long time and all of those other players you know Iran North Korea Russia China find that a really convenient place to be the Russia China alliance if it's really a thing maybe they have agreements for certain areas when they do the thing that I think about the most is just technological exchange right

you always hear this in the military this is you know all of our simulations and models they mean squat because they have a hypersonic missile advantage we can't shoot those down we don't have the capability to shoot down hypersonics in mass what are some other technology advantages that that alliance might pose as a threat to the United States oh my god it's so much more complicated than that let me let me throw in yeah let me throw in something that scrambles that alliance

in a way that blows a lot of people's minds for great many years China has struggled to produce leading edge military jet engines it's got relatively decent avionics and platforms for its its 5 gen fighters but getting the engines up to the performance that US engines or even Russian engines have um has been a struggle for them it's about materials it's about engineering so what do they do they turn to the place that used to be the kind of center of Soviet military aircraft and engine design

Ukraine and they've imported um even before the war but still ongoing they have highly skilled Ukrainian military jet aircraft engineers working in China to help them perfect Chinese military jet engines and adapt the technologies that they're getting from Russia cause who understands the Russia and the Soviet technologies better than the Ukrainians what why why did the United States let that happen we're funding billions of hundreds of billions of dollars

why would we allow them to give this technology technology to China why would we wouldn't that be a contingent part of your offer I'd be like we'll support you with a you know $100 billion but you gotta stop giving China all this technology so there's a market for talent really and China just was willing to pay those engineers to come over to China and work for that it's not like official Ukrainian government policy no no but nonetheless the know how the technology travels right but yes

there's also yeah China has bought the US400 and aircraft systems from Russia and begun producing its own domestic variants and so I think the technological edge between China and Russia has mostly closed except in a few really limited areas possibly submarines the key thing now is that China is developing those technologies and it is scaling them in a way that we cannot match one of the lessons I think of the Ukraine war is it isn't necessarily who has the most exquisite toys

because Russia is winning this thing with a mixture of old fashioned glide bombs not hypersonic missiles right it's winning this thing by being able to produce more artillery than the whole rest of the west combined and using sort of proven technologies or off the shelf technologies like drones in ways that make our emphasis on things like the F35 or particularly exquisitely expensive platforms potentially seem misguided and this is a real question for a kinetic contingency in the Taiwan Strait

can the US simply sustain its effort long enough does it run out of those exquisite missiles I just read a really interesting piece about how up to this point you know the US has wonderful cruise missile technology and standoff missile technology but the ships that fire those missiles have to go back to a limited number of ports either in Honolulu or San Diego to rearm and so imagine a kinetic conflict in the Pacific in which you have those ships release all their missiles and then

they have to sail three weeks back to San Diego to rearm get reloaded and then sail three weeks back they're out of the fight for almost two months that's not a sustainable strategy and so they're experimenting with adaptations to allow us to re arm at sea but it's that kind it's our defense industrial base which we really I think that the gaps in it the inattention to it has the Ukraine war has shown a light on that across the western alliance

so we've really got to shore that up in a massive way you got hypersonics the INF Treaty that the United States signed with the Soviet Union that remained in effect after the fall of the Soviet Union for decades that limited the production of intermediate nuclear intermediate ballistic missiles China was not a party to that so in the period of time where we were self limiting ourselves and the Russians were China proliferated intermediate range ballistic missiles so that it has thousands of them

pointed at targets across the Pacific closing that gap might be something they have an enormous shipbuilding program right beyond the ability of the United States to equal so the question is not necessarily do we try to match them plane for plane ship for ship but rather think about smarter ways to leverage our advantage you're talking about the focus on effective low cost proven solutions and the US military does think about this quite a bit that we they call it asymmetric warfare right

we wanna do things a little bit better and we learn this from our time in Afghanistan where the Taliban and whatever insurgent group as they are attacking our bases in Afghanistan they are shooting these really old Russian rockets that they found off the side of the road wherever they got them from super cheap old rusty things they would shoot them at our bases and we would expend $40,000 worth of ammo to try to shoot these really cheap rockets down

so US military is thinking about this quite a bit investing in low cost proven effective solutions to things like that drones are are an interesting subject you brought that up I think China is way ahead of us in terms of what they're doing with drones and drone swarms I think the United States is very good at countering UAS we have a massive investment in counter UAS programs here in the United States what are your thoughts on drone swarms and are they a future of warfare I look at these things

I think this is the future right here you know when you can autonomously surround a city and simultaneously you have ISR over the whole city and you also have command and control through communication channels through the drones you have an attack mechanism through the drones and it's very hard to take down 4,000 drones that are surrounding your city what are your thoughts on this technology and this is an area where China is definitely in the lead yeah you're absolutely right I again

the lessons of Ukraine in which drone technology has rendered traditional infantry and armor suicidal we have to adapt our doctrine and tactics to match that in real time and I think it's also proven that while we might have very fancy drone technologies they've also been failing in Ukraine because the battlefield adapts so quickly if we cannot change do frequency hopping for example or create jamming resistant UAVs then the best toys will be out of action very quickly

and I think our contractors have Learned this and Ukrainians have kind of embarrassed us by doing a great deal with very little because they don't have the luxury of time and they don't have the luxury of of the budgets that we work with and so we could really learn a lot there I mean there's no mystery to what it takes it's changing the defense procurement process to enable more nimble competitors to enter it and create platforms thing yeah it is I know it's a beast it's a beast right but right

that's gotta be part of the solution right we cannot be reliant on drones that are being produced by the country that could be our principal adversary I mean that's also suicidal you gotta create a nimble domestically sourced industry that and it isn't just building the drones it's a microelectronics that go in them now with regard to swarm technology oh boy so you know going back to the secure program and the question about how do we do fundamental research

in a way that's a little bit smarter and wiser there's an entire literature in the field of AI and robotics that's happening in the open and fundamental lightly regulated research space between US academics and academics in other countries including China that covers the kinds of technologies that are used for AI swarms and up until this point there hasn't been a kind of good infrastructure for us to think comprehensively about whoa what are we doing here what is this mean

what are the potential applications the secure program is I think designed to help people who work in technologies like this make better choices about who they collaborate with and what the ultimate applications of that fundamental research are because I can point I I have them on file examples of collaboration with academics in other countries where those foreign academics explode implicitly are publishing in the area of creating drone swarms to attack US aircraft carriers

so should we be working with those individuals given we know that this is their research agenda and priorities that are being funded by their governments there is a very active line of research in China that is oriented towards marshaling drone swarms to overcome US technological advantage in the event to the kinetic war in the region so yeah it's real yeah it's it's 100% real and I was at a conference recently and one of the commanders for I won't mention the unit

but they were talking about the future of US infantry is first person view drone pilots embedded in every infantry unit because those end drones can fly at 200 miles per hour and you know you get quick access to a target you have a good lay to land and you can really supply a lot of fast intelligence and deliver effects on a target very very quickly and very precisely if you've ever seen those FPV drones those things are crazy they go super fast they can maneuver and without

I think that's an interesting development it's kind of a reaction to what we're seeing in Ukraine you're seeing doctrine built in the United States military saying okay well we need to start adapting this technology ology quickly and then the other thing he mentioned was more focus on integration so he mentioned the launch of a new integration military occupational specialty so it's a essentially an integrator job your job is integrate your job is to take technology here and technology here

grow them together and apply them on the battlefield I think we have some really smart people in the United States military that are looking at this stuff and they're not just sitting on their hands or saying okay what do we need to do now to prepare for these crazy scenarios you mention like US naval vessels being attacked by drone swarms that's amazing we we need to encourage and reward a maker culture 100% that's it right there yeah yeah exactly cause the ingredients are out there

to know how the resolve is out there we just need to create the path for those people to put those great ideas together in ways and I mean isn't that what we like to tell ourselves America does best yeah so let's make it possible for for those people to do that and solve the problems that they face on the battlefield in real time will you mention fixing defense procurement now this is something I spend all my time in so I could I could probably talk for an hour on this

but I think what you just brought up is is exactly the point point is that it doesn't incentivize innovation we don't put innovation as the core of our procurement we put things like oh we want the lowest cost you know low price technically acceptable solution we wanna make sure we spend all our dollars this year so here we go contractor go foil over here instead we also play this game that's I think in in many ways false and fake where we have to pretend that

you know going by the Federal Acquisition Regulations create some type of fair environment for competition it really doesn't it's just silly nonsense you're always gonna have contractors with an advantage to inside know how the relationships inside of an organization and instead I'd like to get away from that movement of focus on fairness and a focus on innovation who's gonna innovate the most here to save the US dollar to drive better solutions into the marketplace anyways

like I said I could probably sit there for an hour and talk about that but only get back to talking a little bit more about something I read the other day that I think was just kind of blew my mind I never really thought about this and this is has to do with illicit fishing so I read that 17.4 kg per person that's the average consumption of a Chinese citizen for fish okay so each Chinese citizen consumes roughly 17.4 kg per person that's like the size of a medium sized pig okay

this is this a lot of fish if you really think about it China consumes approximately 65 million tons of seafood annually accounting for about 45% of global consumption let me read that again cause I messed it all up China consumes approximately 65 million tons of seafood annually accounting for about 45% of global consumption that is a massive amount of seafood now because of that they fished out their waters and now they have to go push into territory and new waters that doesn't belong to them

I read an article from Yale Yale Environment 3 60 okay the article is entitled how China's Expanding Fishing Fleet is depleting the World's Oceans they talk about how big their naval their fishing fleet is compared to the United States what I thought was interesting is that they're comparing the North Korean fishing vessels to China the amount of fish that they can catch and this is what it says most Chinese ships are so large that they scoop up as many fish in a week

as a local boat might catch in a year when you bring that type of capability for fishing into the water you deplete the population of fish and if you're going into other countries territory and doing that out of all the things I listed before the research stealing the intellectual property theft all all the things right the cheating out of all the things I think this is the area that could lead food actually lead to a global war and this is why I think that we're talking about food

right food is the thing when you get people hungry they become angry right they're pushing into other countries territory for fish because they've outfished everything the demand for fish is through the roof in China I just to me it really was an eye opener when I read this article I said I had no idea that they consume so much that they were fishing in another territories and then when you think about it eventually they're gonna fish out all those waters in North Korea

right and they're gonna have to move on to places like Philippine water and that's where I think it gets a little crazy to me what are your thoughts on their illicit fishing and what are the global impacts of it it's a great point that doesn't get the attention that it deserves in the United States one way of thinking about this is rolling back clock and realizing that China's profound economic growth has raised the standard of living for most Chinese people over the last 40 years

and along with that greater wealth is access to higher forms of nutrition and in particular protein and you see this most obviously in the fact that younger Chinese are several inches taller than their parents because their diets are more nutritious when they're growing and so many people are surprised they have a kind of stereotype of of Chinese particularly northern Chinese being relatively short her to European ancestral populations but not necessarily true and certainly

younger people are much taller because they get much more animal protein in their diet now and and some of that is dairy which is a non traditional Chinese food but younger people have been raised on dairy so they get milk as children they get much more beef and pork and then they get seafood which they have a strong taste for I'm particularly in coastal China now that with that wealth with the appetite the money to spend and the technology China has appeared as a player

in the international fishing market in a way that it appears in almost every place sort of you know when you got 1.4 billion people behind you you show up in force and the China's distant fishing fleets are the world's largest now trying to satisfy that appetite for seafood and they've displaced Japan's fishing fleets and Korean and Taiwan in the Western Pacific and in fact there are regular clashes in waters that are disputed among those countries between their fishing fleets

and their domestic coast guards and so regularly you'll read about how Taiwanese fishermen were apprehended by the Chinese Coast Guard or the Chinese Coast Guard ran the Japanese fishing vessel because they're in disputed waters and these are in fact some of the incidents which if not handled well could become sparks are either deteriorating relations or a trade of blows this happened with the Philippines recently in which over contested islands in the South China Sea

um Chinese coast guard detains Filipino fishermen destroys their boats beats them and obviously you know people in the Philippines respond extremely negatively to that in the US as a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines and so it could get complex very quickly now the waters of the Western Pacific because they have been overfished for decades by countries um in addition to China are a hotspot because of those disputed territories but China's distant

deep water fishing cleats are going truly global now such that they are dominant in the squid fisheries off the coast of South America in particular off Peru and Chile vacuuming up immense amounts of seafood but particular squid in ways that the local fishing fleets cannot compete with and you put your finger exactly on it the local traditional artisanal fisher fleets which support communities in those countries are being put out of business and their way of life is being changed

by these technologically advanced equivalent of fishing supertankers that arrive vacuum up immense amounts of fish freeze them and package them on deck and then they get off loaded and they show up in in supermarkets without ever really touching dry ground until that point the traditional technologically less advanced countries can't touch that so it's especially acute in the eastern Pacific um stretches of the Galapagos it's especially acute in Oceania the islands of Micronesia

which have the relatively well regulated tuna fisheries which China is nibbling around the edges of because of course tuna is immensely prized and extremely valuable and it's especially happening off the coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea where it is destroying traditional communities that just simply cannot compete their boats can't travel as far the very powerful well connected rich Chinese fishing companies are bribing local officials to get them to overlook their fishing regulations

so there is an intense almost wild west competition for these diminishing global fish stocks just that that number of just really stood out to me they consume 45% of the Earth's fish I mean that's insane to me anyways it's a global problem yeah yeah I mean just out of all the things my instinct is that that's the thing that could really spark some type of global conflict because it's dealing with food and you just don't mess with people's food you don't mess with their money

you don't mess with their food those are the two things that people just will be up in arms about let's switch over to technology a little bit more I mean I know we talked about drones but saw this tweet the other day that was put out by Mario Northwall he's he puts out a bunch of very news focused stuff and this is what it says it says tech domination China leaves us in the dust China's got the tech game unlocked leading in 57 of 64 critical technologies two decades ago it was just three

now they're leading in quantum sensors semiconductors drones and a few other areas you mention vaccines as well with 24 technologies at high risk of Chinese monopoly the global tech race isn't just heating up it's on fire and that says who will lead the future recently Google actually I think just yesterday they put out their new quantum ship which is crazy to think about by the way their new quantum chip Google's new quantum chip it was just kind of an aside in the press release

but it just proved that we live in a multiverse just they just cut through that in there by the way it can do so many calculations it can do one with 25 zeros after it calculations per second because of the way quantum computing works it's basically proven that we have to live in a multiverse there's no way that it could do that many calculations at the same time I'm still trying to wrap my head around it and learn more about that as well so so so the question is this

China is leading in these very key categories you mention like it's not just that they're stealing anymore it's that they're they're leading they're pushing in these areas we think about quantum computing and AI the question is how do we seize the future or maybe the question is this is whoever wins this race quantum AI whatever that is who knows what that is right like we could sit here and have a conversation about who knows what that even means

I think perception of what that means is gonna be so a skew 10 years from now do we need to be doing more to directly block China and advancing this and if they do what are they going to with an AI advantage let's say if they do develop one I think we're still I think United States is still good but I think their their government funds a lot more AI tools and technologies what do we do if they win this race this is my question it took me a long time to get there I want to apologize what do we do

China wins this race to quantum AI there we go there is a lot in there so let me see if I can the Google announcement that you mentioned is an important breakthrough in the sense of being a proof of concept it demonstrated that that particular chip has quantum advantage and quantum supremacy and has achieved something that no other chip has done and they they actually moved it beyond simulation moved it beyond theory and implemented but it is sort of a one trick pony at this point

and it is not clear whether that achievement translates into any actual practical application for the moment it may be that the practical applications because the field moves so quickly emerge in five years for this technology or 25 years that is where you will get fierce debates from people within the quantum community about how ripe and mature this stuff is for practical applications now the most obvious practical application is in factorization problems

which have real applications in breaking cryptography so that's definitely received a lot of attention and and rightly so but quantum semiconductors in quantum chip technology generally is not as versatile as as classical semiconductors in classical computing technologies and so they tend to do a rather limited range of problems phenomenally well now having said that there's a lot of sensationalistic reporting about like who's out in front in which technologies

or how many technologies China in the United States and everything comes down to the metrics you use and the methodologies that you use to come up with your findings on that I believe that a lot of that more headline grabbing reporting is a is a little bit extreme is not founded The United States is still highly competitive if not leading in a great many of those technologies though there might be particular corners in which China is out in front but the story there is not necessarily who's

who's like a little in front or a little behind it's that suddenly we are in a race what and and it happened almost while we were asleep at the wheel simply assuming that what had always worked for us in the past would continue to work for us in the future because nobody had the comprehensive wealth resolve and ability to mobilize to challenge us that's no longer the case so quantums is an area which is a great example of how research security military security

and basic economic competitiveness all come together because the United States cannot do cannot win the quantum race on its own there are a lot of places particularly in Europe which are exceptionally good at quantum that continue to work with partners around the world including those in China and so any solution to quantum competition with China has to be multilateral we cannot again retreat into Fortress America and simply close off collaboration between American

scientists and Chinese scientists because leading other scientists around the world will continue to work with China and will be the ones who are isolated and falling behind we need a more nimble set of solutions there what troubles me about the quantum race in particular is something that you could find across a lot of sectors in the United States and that is quantum and AI in general are becoming so phenomenally expensive to do that the traditional centres of excellence in scientific research

which have been our universities our national labs can no longer afford to do them and they're getting left behind and they're being essentially corporateized by a very small number of extremely rich well resource companies whether it's Google IVM Open AI Microsoft but it really is a handful of companies that can afford the the many billions of dollars in order to drive this technology forward and that is good so long as it lasts in the quantum space

the hyper concentration of development is such that if that technology does not offer the returns on investment that satisfies shareholders two five 10 years from now those companies may pivot in another direction they may say you know what we spent a lot of money on this it turned out to be a bit of a dead end we're gonna spend our money on other things and then the US ability to stay in the quantum race will be diminished whereas China won't be subject to those kinds of restraints

and will continue to be pushing ahead so we have a you know I I am very pro market but market forces also introduce certain vulnerabilities because capital can be fickled so we've got to find ways to sustain our effort in this area that are not dependent on a handful of CEOs and that is true also in the AI space it's true in semiconductors and a number of others we become so hyper concentrated in a few places and the places that drove our initial innovation

in the high point of American technological leadership which were our labs and our universities finding it harder to have a presence in those spaces and it's also true in some of those key technologies that while we might be on the leading edge of the research side we're doing a really poor job of converting that knowledge into commercialized product particularly tangible products that have to be manufactured because we've lost the manufacturing ability

and our capital markets don't reward people who are willing to take the risk on building things when you could make money on Bitcoin or social media so consequently the IP might be developed in the United States but when you get to the point where you wanna build a pilot demonstration project prove that this thing is viable at scale they have to go to Asia to manufacture it and then you lose the IP and not only do you lose that sort of background IP but in the process of manufacturing it

the people who manufacture it will do process innovation and they will improve upon your IP and take it further than you could have and then the United States loses that so we've seen this in industry after industry battery technologies another great industry in which this has happened and the challenge for the United States is not only how do we preserve the research side of it but how do we ensure that we fix the problems in the capital markets and the values of death

so that innovators here in the United States can actually build in the United States create jobs in the United States and create those virtuous cycles of innovation here it's funny mention the value of death because that's something I've experienced personally it's it is real if you try to innovate for the government and create some software it will end up in that valley in some way shape or form but the question about quantum what makes it so not just quantum

but also artificial general intelligence maybe I should say if you get to a point where the AI is improving itself at a rate that is sufficient right if it's improving itself making itself better essentially you've created a god right you've created something that's so knowledgeable and understands the universe in such a way that humans can't quite fathom this the question is if China wins that if they get to that point where they have this AGI

person maybe it's a simplistic way of to think of AGI there's different ways we can think about AI but in a very simple method do they have the will to dominate the rest of the world with the tool like that China I think I would not attribute the will to dominate the world to the Chinese leadership and they certainly want a world that is congenial to their interests they are hyper aware of the immense blood and treasure that the United States has spent

managing its various interests around the world and Chinese strategists will often write that that's not a trap that they wanna fall into because it's very expensive now they may stumble into it because they've developed interests around the world economically but they're conscious of the fact that in some ways that's kind of like a burden on a nation they would like to kind of ride the way without having to invest very deeply in in it in the way that the United States has

but if they develop AGI it creates all kinds of questions for military escalation for example we've got to and we are having those conversations with the Chinese government with Chinese firms about escalation control crisis control because when you think about the Cuban missile crisis it was human beings you know in the White House um in the Kremlin who had just a few days a few days seemed incredibly short here you might have a few seconds if you don't think about these problems in advance

for crisis controlling and ensuring that human beings stay in the loop but there will always be that pressure with AI to accelerate it because the adversary might have AI and fewer humans in the process and in the loop the TRC is extremely concerned about the possibilities of AI because a regime that survives on information control and information dominance can't simply surrender that to an AI model and so you see in Chinese LLMs for example they're highly competitive in many respects with uslms

but they also are kinda handcuffed in particular corners that have to do with sensitivities regarding the CCP and so I think there's a genuine question about whether the CCP's sensitivities about its political monopoly will become an inhibitory will have an inhibitory effect on AI and AGI it'll be really good for particular industrial applications but a broader base comprehensive general intelligence this I think would be even more threatening to the regime than

anything voice of America could put out so all right well you ease my fears a little bit okay not as worried about AGI maybe I'll sleep a little bit better tonight yeah well I mean AGI is fiercely debated anyway about what it really means it's almost a philosophical war between people in the AI community keeping us focus on technology I read this today actually that China has successfully invented a surgery for curing alzheimer's disease known as LVA surgeries it is performed on neck lymphatic

so far there have been 42 clinical trials and all have been successful you mentioned previously about not just these high tech areas but high tech medicine is an area where China is actually making straws I guess my question regarding that is do we focus too much on human rights in the United States and is it their lack of care for human rights or is there lack of care for human rights that enables them to push the boundaries on so many different medical fronts

or is it just purely their culture of innovation that is pushing some of these things I I see all these crazy things about China you know using animals and humans and all this silly stuff but my thought is like okay well why shouldn't we look at how an animal's DNA could affect the human's DNA and for certain things what are your thoughts on this right um that's a great question now I'm not familiar with this particular I just read it today so maybe overall

but I will say this is a general observation because I watched the China tech space really carefully in the innovation space and there's phenomenal world leading work coming out of China but there is also a very heavy state driven propaganization of China's innovation such that certain things are spun much more spectacularly than you know you scratch the surface and there's nothing there's not really really there see this especially in the eye space

and semiconductors and quantum in a lot of areas and so figuring out how much is smoke and spin and how much is real is always a challenge and sometimes the propaganda headlines picked up in western reporting that China has achieved XY or Z and we're actually carrying their water for them rather than going up deeper realize not realizing that there is a lot of propaganda attached to this stuff now about the human rights concerns look the United States developed human subjects protections

because we had a history of exploiting vulnerable populations and whether it was racial minorities whether it was women whether it was pregnant women in biomedical research because people have the freedom make unethical choices in the absence of hard and fast rules and reviews around this stuff and those processes and protections were adopted in the 70s and 80s largely in response to very real scandals in which people were abused and so I would never say that we should do away with them

it's always a question of you know protections are there for a good reason but sometimes protections canon like any regulation can inhibit innovation and so it's always a question of balance and it's probably good to revisit these things from time to time but we should always keep first and forefront the fact that human beings are involved and we need to protect human dignity and privacy and and the integrity of human bodies and also the social impact of the technologies

I mean what a different world we would live in if the people who created our social media technologies had thought for a moment about the potential negative social impact of what they were unleashing on the world but they didn't market forces rewarded them for doing a particular set of things and so now we're in the world where we worry about TikTok we worry about the effect on presidential elections we worry about what it does to our kids for biomedical research in China

you have to acknowledge that China has a different set of cultural norms that are different than those in the United States and our traditional western partners which largely come out of Judeo Christian ethical norms so there are things about fetuses about about uses of DNA for example that might resonate differently in a Chinese cultural context they are also beginning to build some of the protections in regulatory and statutory forms that on their principal research partners have

partly to prove that they are good international research citizens because there have been scandals in China as well and those exist on paper but China has really uneven record of enforcing its formal regulations and sometimes because there's perverse incentive structures that will reward people for achieving breakthroughs or for claiming to achieve breakthroughs people will bend the rules people will overlook the rules and maybe not bear the consequences so the enforcement side can

sometimes be really variable and weak and there will be Chinese researchers who will take risks and then sometimes and in the case of China this is extremely real the ambition to rapidly scale the league tables in a particular technology the national governmental ambition to become a world leader will override the ethical concerns and so there is a real question about how much they're willing to slow themselves down by playing by the kinds of human rights rules that others do

and then there are applications of biomedical research and genomic research that have direct consequences on police populations in China in particular Tibetans and Uyghurs in which they do not have the freedom to consent to the collection of their DNA which can be used to surveil them to repress them and so that's I think a great example of how when you work with non traditional research partners who are not Liberal democracies who are authoritarian states

that operate according to different standards and political ideologies you know the research may seem clean unproblematic but that research may have applications in the context of that other nation which you need to think about hard that may not even occur to you in a US context because we're not in the habit of running concentration camps with millions of people in them and the secure program again is meant to help our researchers think through those kinds of problems it is critically important

as we work in a more complex international environment in which nations have different histories and standards than us if we're gonna do science with them we're gonna do industrial collaboration and partnerships with them to kinda take them where they are as they are and figure out okay given that how do we work in a way that's consistent with our values and interests I know you have a hard stop soon but before you go I wanna see if we can get some kinda rapid

fire questions here I have so many questions and I feel like you've really helped me understand China a lot more I I'm telling you I I walked into this with next to no knowledge I mean just very little knowledge maybe more than the average citizen but I feel now like I have a much better idea of what China actually is when I hear the word China I'll have a different sense of what the the nation of China is so some quick questions for you and then we can hop off

what are three books that someone can read to learn more about China I think a great book Kevin Rudd the former prime minister of Australia are currently Australia's ambassador to the United States Trust wrote a hard deep locust xijin thing trying to sort of educate our son who is this guy what matters to him what does he think about I think that's a great deep dive into into that individual another book is by the historian also an Australian actually come to think of it um

John Fitzgerald called Kodrick Country which is a short book it's very readable but it's a great introduction to how China and its government is organized in ways that might be really unfamiliar to the United States that will make a lot of how China acts in the world sort of tractable for the average American reader and so let me just offer those two you're giving me this cold question let me think on a good third one you're good you're good send me the third book

and I'll put it in the description somewhere for those of you who are interested in mill topics I'm gonna refer you to something we did in house at the Hoover Institution called the Boiling Moat and this one's great cause it's a freebie you can download the PDF from Hoover dot org just look for the Boiling Moat it's an edited volume together by um former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottenger who's one of our fellows that takes a hard look about what it would take to preserve peace

and security and turrence in the Taiwan Strait in military terms and it has a great cross section of collaborators in it I think it probably would be a very much of interest to your audience I will place a link to the boiling mode in the description so no matter where you're listening or watching this check out the description I'll put a link there you can access that boiling mode that he mentioned all right what's it like working with Conda Lisa Rice haha she's a phenomenal inspirational leader

who's brought it a new energy to the Hoover Institution I think it's been a real privilege to work under her and someone who is extraordinarily gifted in so many ways I mean a fluent Russian speaker amazing concert pianist has served our country in numerous capacities and I was reflecting the other day on how you know there's certain individuals where you look at their life stories and you say they've lived for five lives enough or a whole fan full of people right oh she was a child

during the church bombings in Birmingham Alabama her father was a pastor um she remembers what that was like Jim Crow America she was present and played a role in the reunification of Germany when the Berlin Wall came down she was of course by President Bush's side at 9 11 um she has been in so many critical sort of junctures of America and is a walking kind of repository of wisdom that like I say it's been a joy to work for her and I think Hoover's never been stronger as

as under her leadership that's awesome she's definitely one of my inspirations when you think about people that are like man the people I like to add is my role models or people that I know are better than me it's like certain people are not like she's way better than me probably at everything she probably runs faster than me she probably lifts more than me I don't know she's definitely smarter than me so she's definitely I have to say working at Hoover that is also a joy

like you look in any direction and there's someone that you can learn from and model yourself on and and help make yourself better so yeah I hear you on that okay and then this this is a question that's actually just through my research online one of the most popular questions that's asked on Google is why did China build the Great Wall right so there an important thing to understand is there is not a single Great Wall the Great Wall is a kind of combination of a multiplicity of walls

that were built over several thousand years that were never exactly connected they were built by different dynasties different rulers different emperors all for specific purposes so the Great Wall is kind of a misnomer I mean it is a thing if you add up all the pieces and so why did they build it a lot of reasons but one of the principal ones is North China borders an area of the steps of Russia in which nomadic tribes lived that would come raiding out of the steps

into the sedentary agricultural plains of North China and sees their well take over their cities and warfare and that nature and so you know going back historically keeping those nomadic tribes on the other side of the wall was was one of the reasons they built the wall but very often actually it was more effective to simply buy off those tribes by making alliances with their leaders investing them with titles and sending them tribute from time to time so you bought the piece very often

the wall was not the barrier to invasion that some people might have thought it was in fact sometimes the the generals who manned the wall were bribed to open the gates and let in those armies okay it all makes more sense now well Glenn thank you so much amazing stuff one last thing how can people learn more about you and what you're doing at the Hoover Institute where should they go to find out more about you well thank you take a look at our program the program on us trying on the world

it's Hoover dot org backslash USCW for US China and the world all of our work is up there my work is up there and I would encourage any of your audience to take a look at our resources we do podcast we do regular speaker series we do publications thanks so much for being here I'll make sure to put all that cool stuff in the description so you can access everything easily appreciate you thank you it's been a great pleasure all right